Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday November 05, 2015 @05:11PM
from the finding-davy-jones'-locker-combination dept.

An anonymous reader writes: A swarm of pumpkin-shaped robots is being developed to map oceans, gathering maritime data for use in tourism, reef monitoring and anti-terrorism among other applications. The Eve robot – or Ellipsodial Vehicle for Exploration – was created by Sampriti Bhattacharyya, a robotics engineer at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT). Inspired by the loss of the Malaysia Airlines plane, the scientist envisions her yellow robots travelling below the water's surface, using their sensors to detect and monitor underwater happenings – both individually and collaboratively.

Yea good luck mapping much with that.
And check out the video for it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] - the very end where they all swarm off the bottom towards a ship is just creepy...

Let's hope they're also on the look-out for debris like from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 etc..

I'm sure there's a bunch of human crap down there (though probably re-purposed where possible by the local inhabitants), but all of it should be of interest to us...either for the damage it's causing, or the damage it's from.

Most of the applications listed for this pumpkin would be done better with an underwater glider [wikipedia.org]. They've been in use for years, I always thought they are an especially clever design for long range underwater vehicles.